Air quality
Show live AQI and particulate readings on your weather website, from a Davis AirLink, an Ecowitt WH41/WH45/WH46, or any PM sensor a relay uploads.
If your station reports particulates, your site can show live readings and a colour-coded air-quality index. Any PM sensor Pro Weather can see works: a Davis AirLink on your WeatherLink account, an Ecowitt WH41, WH45 or WH46 module, or any PM sensor whose readings reach your upload URL through weewx, Meteobridge or CumulusMX. There is no extra setup beyond the readings arriving.
What visitors see
- An Air quality tile in the Overview grid and a dedicated Air quality tab.
- The current AQI with a colour-coded health category, on the band scale of whichever standard you chose, showing where the current reading sits.
- The main pollutant (PM2.5 or PM10) behind the current index.
- Live PM1, PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations in µg/m³.
- A historical chart of air quality over time, with the same range switcher as the other tabs.
Choosing an AQI standard
Different regions score air quality differently, so you can pick the scale your visitors know, under Advanced → Air quality → Air Quality Index standard:
| Standard | Where it is official | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| European AQI (EEA) (the default) | European Union | Six bands, Good to Extremely poor |
| US EPA AQI | United States | The familiar 0-500 index |
| UK Daily Air Quality Index | United Kingdom | 1-10 in four bands (COMEAP) |
| Common AQI (CAQI) | European cities | 0-100, urban-background scale |
| Canada AQHI | Canada | Health-risk index, 1-10+ |
| Australia NEPM | Australia | Ratio scale where 100 is the national standard |
| Luchtkwaliteitsindex (LKI) | Netherlands | 1-11 |
| BelAQI | Belgium | 1-10, every level with its own name |
Whichever you pick, the index is computed from your own PM2.5 and PM10 readings, and the worse pollutant sets the headline. The colour scale, the category names and the chart all follow the standard you chose.
Canada's AQHI needs PM2.5
The published AQHI formula has no PM10 term at all, so a sensor that only reports PM10 shows no index under that standard. Every other scale works from either pollutant.
A note on averaging
Most of these indexes are officially defined on a 1-hour or 24-hour mean; your station reports a live value, so what you see tracks the standard's breakpoints right now rather than a regulatory determination. The dashboard tells you which averaging period each standard is defined on when you pick it.
Getting the sensor detected
Air quality can reach your site three ways; the tile and tab appear as soon as particulate readings arrive by any of them:
- Davis AirLink, discovered automatically when you connect WeatherLink. If you add an AirLink later, open Connection and choose Reconnect & rediscover.
- Ecowitt hardware: a WH41 or WH43 outdoor PM2.5 sensor, or a WH45/WH46 combo module (which also reports CO2), through the gateway's Customized upload or your ecowitt.net connection.
- A relay (weewx, Meteobridge, CumulusMX): any PM sensor the relay reads, including an AirLink. A relay only sends what its upload URL asks for, so make sure the URL carries the particulate fields - the ready-made URLs in Connect other hardware already do.
If your AirLink is a station of its own
Bought separately, an AirLink is usually registered in WeatherLink as its own station rather than as a sensor on your weather station - two entries, not one. Your site still shows both. It renders one station (the one you pick under Panels → Stations, normally your weather station), and reads the particulates from wherever they actually are, so the tile, the tab, the charts and your PM2.5 alerts all work without you choosing between the two.
Picked the AirLink to work around this?
Owners who set Panels → Stations to their AirLink to get air quality at all should switch it back to their weather station: air quality follows on its own now, and the temperature, wind and rain come back with it.
If you'd rather have everything arrive as a single station, a relay does that too - weewx, Meteobridge or CumulusMX reading the console and the AirLink and posting one combined upload to your hardware ingest URL, whose ready-made URLs already carry the particulate fields.
Alert on poor air
Whatever the sensor, you can add a PM2.5 above threshold to your email alerts, so you hear about poor air even when you're not watching the site.